Director Lee Daniels on Teaching Oprah to Smoke for The Butler: “She Got Into It a Little Too Much”

Director Lee Daniels’s latest film is The Butler, a story based on a Washington Post article that Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Danny Strong then adapted into a feature film. The movie is based on the life of Eugene Allen (renamed Cecile Gaines and played by Forest Whitaker), a black man who witnesses eight presidential administrations and the tumultuous civil-rights movement of the 60s during his tenure as a White House butler. The Hollywood Blog caught up with Daniels to discuss the film’s comment on modern-day politics, the most difficult scenes to film, and Liev Schreiber’s R. Kelly–inspired Lyndon B. Johnson speeches.

__The Hollywood Blog:__This movie is a beautiful story of a father and son, but it also tells the story of modern American history. Is that what you set out to do?

Lee Daniels: That was what Danny [Strong, screenwriter,] intended to do. It’s a father-and-son story, ultimately, with the backdrop of the civil-rights movement, and what occurred in the White House as a sort of a backdrop. But ultimately, it’s a father-and-son story.

How did you come to this project?

Wil Haygood wrote a piece inTheWashington Post. Danny then wrote a script; Laura Ziskin, God rest her soul, who produced Pretty Woman and the series of Spider Man franchises, wanted to do something important. She also created Stand Up to Cancer. She was dying, and she wanted to do something important, leave a legacy. This is her final film. She passed away right before we went into production.

Forest Whitaker said you spoke with people who worked at the White House. What was it like?

A lot of people wouldn’t talk to me, because a lot of people thought that my films are a little out there. [Laughs.] Some African Americans didn’t really respond to Precious, and some had seen Paper Boy and were just expecting me to do something sort of out there. I felt that I could still tell this story in a PG-13 way, but still have the heart and—not the zaniness—but the rawness, in places that my prior films had. Some people think it’s sort of square. I feel like sometimes I’m losing my street cred . . .

You tend to work with friends. I know you have a relationship with Oprah Winfrey. Mariah Carey is in this in a small role. What about the others in the cast?

We’re all friends. Well, sort of. We became really good friends after this experience, but we’re all friendly. When you’re African American and you do what we do, we all sort of know each other. I think that Danny’s material spoke to the movement, the cause. I believe in God and the universe taking care of me, and I think that so many [of them]—Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, John Cusack, Robin Williams—all of them are political and stand behind the right thing. We didn’t know that Trayvon Martin [would be killed] or that Lyndon Johnson’s voting-rights law would be snatched away from Congress, pretty much to stop blacks from voting. But I think that there was a reason bigger than the film.

What scenes were particularly difficult to shoot?

I think the hardest scene was having Denzel Washington’s daughter, who is in the film, too, get a milkshake thrown in her face. That was a very hard scene to shoot. Another hard scene to shoot was the bus scene. On it we used a real bus from the time, and the damn thing didn’t have any air conditioning in it. And I yell Action! and all these K.K.K. members are coming up [with] crosses, and Nazis are coming out with swastikas, and they’re coming for us. That’s really scary. I yell *Cut!*and they don’t hear the “cut,” and for a millisecond, I knew what it was like for those kids, what those kids were feeling.

I broke down in tears. I said, Oh my God. They were heroes. Oh my God! . . . I think that’s what we need. We need more heroes like that today. It’s just a different time.

Did Oprah complain about having to smoke all the time?

Of course. She didn’t know how, so I literally taught her how. She had never held a cigarette. And we don’t have time for rehearsal. We don’t rehearse in my films, because time is money, and we don’t have any money. We learn on the spot. I think she did a good job.

She looked natural. I was just wondering if it annoyed her.

She got into it a little too much. I said, Oprah, it’s addictive. That’s the reason we’ve got to be careful, honey.[Laughs.]

Did working on this project awaken issues of race in America in your mind?

In the beginning I just did it because I loved the story of the father and the son. I have a son that was 13 when we got it and started developing the script, and he’s 17 now. My dad and I didn’t get along at all, because I was gay, and he just didn’t understand it. I loved the father-and-son story. It’s what attracted me. We had no idea what we would be hitting on with this. I stopped when the movie was over with, and I sat back and watched the film, and thought, Holy cow, this is also a political statement about the times we’re in right now.

There are so many great cameos—Liev Schreiber, John Cusack, Robin Williams—and they’re wearing jowls to look like past presidents. Did anyone make you laugh when you looked at them?

I didn’t know that Liev Schreiber could be so funny. He’s so serious in all of his stuff. He looked in the camera as he’s giving L.B.J.’s speech, and he starts singing in the camera as I’m running: I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky. I said, ‘Liev!’ And he wouldn’t stop. In between each paragraph of this important, historic speech that Johnson gave, he would go on with I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky. And then he would come back to Johnson. I said, You are fucking this speech up, Schreiber! Stop it!